Fred:

I agree with you that Islam has scriptural, theological, and historical legacies that make it congenitally militant. I also agree with Teresita that the United States is congenitally a secular state that is not at war with any religion. The problem comes whenever a religion declares war on America or declares that American laws simply do not apply to worshippers in the United States.

This is one of the reasons why I watched the FLDS saga in Texas with so much interest. Despite my natural antipathy against social services, I don’t think Texas’s capitulation to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints necessarily set a good precedent.

I am inclined to think that Ataturk unleashed a monster when he abolished the Caliphate. Although he was not averse to creating the reality of a Caliphate (and the Organization of the Islamic Conference is unfortunately the closest Islam has to Ataturk’s ideal caliphate), he saw how the Constantinople Caliphate had become a fiction. The advantage of a Constantinople Caliphate was obvious for western powers. A weak Ottoman Caliphate at the mercy of western powers would be able to change the customs of Islam and set precedents that undermined concepts such as jizya. For that matter, the Palestinian Mandate for the United Kingdom was ratified by the Ottoman Caliphate, so the State of Israel could be theoretically considered to be a legitimate successor state of the Ottoman Empire according to Islamic precedent.

With no more Caliphate, the world of Islam has entered a prolonged interregnum. Usually, an interregnum is ended by the rise of an emperor, but that has not happened. There have been many pretenders, from Gamal Abdel Nasser to Ayatollah Khomeini to Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, even Moammar Qaddafi, but no man has been able to claim the mantle no matter how hard he has tried.

Whatever else can be said about Saudi control over Mecca and Medina, it feels very insulting to most traditional Muslims (whether Sunni or Shi’a). The House of Sa’ud is considered to be a family of desert bumpkins with an alien theology regarded as thuggish by Muslim standards — and this house of clowns has the keys to the Muslim holy places. What a joke!

It is a measure of how low Islam has fallen to find a family regarded as the lowest of the low controlling Mecca and Medina. Imagine if a church of Virginian snake handlers became the ruling family of New York, or if an illiterate Guatemalan peasant without even a high school education became the President of Harvard. That’s what it would probably feel like being a Muslim where Wahhabis control Islam’s holy places.

It may be true that Islam cannot reform itself. I think it is certainly true that Islam cannot reform itself as long as the House of Saud keeps the keys to Mecca and Medina. The problem, how I see it, is not whether the Saudi royal family should be overthrown; that’s a given. The problem is to ensure that when the present Saudi regime is overthrown, the alternative becomes an actual improvement over the status quo. As it is, the most likely successor to the House of Saud is the present Iranian government, and Iranian regime in control of the Arabian peninsula is not a prospect I find pleasing.